Tales Of Adventure, Nature Love, And Money On The Globalocal Mushroom Trail

Whole Earth, Spring, 2000 by David Arora

My first encounter with "mushroom pickers" was not by design. My class and I arrived at a normally deserted campground in the Sierra Nevada, one I have used annually for a spring mushroom workshop, only to find it occupied by a weather-beaten band of migrant mushroom pickers--three adults, four children, and assorted dogs and cats living and traveling in a 30-year-old school bus. They had been "sitting on the burn" (a nearby burned area) for more than a month, waiting for conditions to produce a profitable flush of morels. Having seen sensationalized newspaper accounts of overly territorial, gun-toting mushroom pickers, I was surprised that they didn't try to chase us off. At the very least, I expected them to resent the sudden intrusion and competition that my class of thirty-five citified adults (and nearly as many SUVs) represented.

But the next day I understood their unconcern. One of them, a teenager, picked more of the elusive morels in two hours than my entire class (under my "expert" guidance) was able to find in two days. I was impressed--and more than a little humbled. In a society where practically all children get their knowledge of nature secondhand, from schools and television, these young mushroom pickers were striking exceptions.

Nancy (where requested, I have honored the first-name-only tradition of mushroom pickers), the matriarch of the clan, explained that she came from a long line of fruit pickers. "Fruit is what I grew up in. Children used to be able to pick fruit, but not any more. Mushroom picking is the only thing left. It's legal for the children, and good for them because they get sunshine, fresh air, an' they get to experience what [kind of work] their parents do, which is real important."

Like most migrant mushroom pickers, Nancy has no bank account, no checkbook, no credit card. "In the last ten years I haven't taken a steady job once," she says with obvious pride. "It's pretty much been mushrooms and huckleberries." That night they enthralled us with tales of their exploits and adventures on "the mushroom trail"--a string of obscure logging and mining communities, crossroads, and frontier outposts stretching from Alaska to California. Cranberry Junction. Nass. Bella Coola. Boston Bar. Forks. Hungry Horse. Gospel Hump. Crescent Lake. Granite. Prairie City. Happy Camp. The names meant nothing to my class of weekend naturalists, but in the lives of these professional mushroom pickers they clearly loomed larger than San Francisco, Seattle, or New York. As one who has devoted his life to studying the worldwide harvest of wild mushrooms and other non-timber forest products, I resolved, that evening in 1993, to join the "mushroom trail," and have been on and off it ever since.

Wild mushrooms were extolled by Roman and Chinese emperors and have long provided an important everyday food source for rural people around the world. Until recently, however, a deep and exaggerated distrust of wild mushrooms has denied these fungi a cherished place at the North American dinner table. That changed in the 1980s, when rising demand overseas caused mushroom lovers there to look abroad for new sources. At the same time, North Americans' palates grew bolder and more sophisticated. American and Canadian entrepreneurs rushed to fill the rapidly growing market for gourmet foods. And out-of-work rural Americans and recent immigrants (particularly from Southeast Asia) saw picking mushrooms as a chance to make a decent living in a familiar environment--the forest--while maintaining their personal dignity and cultural autonomy.

The "mushroom trail" is actually a seasonal migration route that begins in British Columbia with the late summer harvest of matsutake and chanterelles. In September and October the migration snakes southward, following warmer weather through Washington and Oregon, reaching the Siskiyous of southern Oregon in November, and northern California in December. Many migrating pickers overwinter in California, where the mild coastal climate yields a "winter pick" of chanterelles, black trumpets, and hedgehogs that tides them over until the spring morel season.

Then, in April, as morels and king boletes begin to show around Mount Shasta and in the mountains of eastern Oregon, pickers climb into their "rigs" and drive northward again. By July and August they have fanned out over more than a dozen states and provinces. Some range into Alaska and the Yukon, where thick carpets of morels grow in burns accessible only by helicopter, floatplane, or river raft. Others opt for tamer pickings, such as lobster mushrooms and summer chanterelles on the fogbound coast of Oregon. Still others prospect in the northern Rockies for boletes and huckleberries, and a few head east toward Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia in search of chanterelles, until the lucrative matsutake begins to appear in the Northwest in August and September. This most valuable of wild mushrooms, with the allure of big bucks (seldom realized but constantly dreamed about), acts like a magnet, drawing the widely scattered pickers to a few "famous" hotspots like Cranberry Junction and Crescent Lake for several weeks of frenzied picking, before frost and snow drive them southward again.